By fourteen, she had mastered the art of being two people. There was Justdanica in the classroom—straight A’s, hair brushed, hand raised—and there was the other one, the one who lay awake at 2 a.m. counting the ceiling tiles, wondering if a person could dissolve from loneliness while still breathing. She wrote poems in the margins of her notebooks, then erased them. She learned that silence is a language, too. And she became fluent.
When the tears stopped, the rain had stopped, too. The world smelled like wet asphalt and something green—something growing.
“Don’t cry,” her mother whispered from the doorway, not looking at her. “We don’t cry.”
